When Colts Ran

by Roger McDonald

  Normie was not religious but the son lives out what the father only attempts, evolutionary theory insists, otherwise no evolution, and that was Normie, with his gift of knowledge that had arrived that day. The vision of spouting water told him all he needed to know of life. His father was tied to a clumsy pushcart but Norm never would be. If bonds ever bound him he would die in preference to having himself strapped down. Never say die, say, ‘Fuck ’em.’

  The academy had a research station on the coast where Normie exhausted himself skindiving. In the rugby season he wore an electronic heart monitor on the sidelines. Nobody went as hard at living as that. Life was a scrum heaving and straining, the ball in there somewhere and coach Normie screaming over the sportsfield, ‘Get it out! Get it out, you bastards!’

  Almost single-handedly Normie Powell worked on rule changes at the national and international level of the game, minimising neck and spinal injuries until they became the standard.

  But now to this day when Bonney received a call with bad news half expressed and he was asked to hold the line.

  Waiting, phone in hand, he pictured the Dividing Range hills from Norman’s wide, clean office window. They rose beyond the shaved edge of the parade ground, massive and sheep-cropped like low poured glass, with sometimes a flash of silver as a plane made its approach or took off. Bonney gave an imagined glance inside the room. No asepsis there – a cigarette spiralling smoke from an ashtray, a half-eaten white bread roll containing low-cholesterol spread and salami, a mug of black coffee steaming on the edge of the desk, briefly abandoned. Periodic tables and molecular models like a child’s toys. There was no tricking with fate in Normie Powell’s way of things.

  Then, at last, Bonney imagined Normie’s footsteps in the corridor hurrying back, drawn towards the sound of the ringing phone, the waiting illicit cigarette, the heart-cheering caffeine, footsteps coming too fast, beating, pounding their way down the corridor, blood gathering from the veins too quickly, too urgently, the veins becoming congested and the pressure rising intolerably.

  It was no good. Bonney drew a line through waiting as he always did, leaving it to others to attend to what was needed.

  That night he drove in. Darkness star-shining still. Fog in the hollows. A man lay writhing on a hospital bed, drip-feed tubes in his nose, Normie Powell dumped on his side as if hurled from a height, dropped on his head, you might say, his life knocking itself out. A man younger than Bonney, but not by much, as they got older, a shiner from Isabel Junction Intermediate High, gold on the honour board, clammy, half naked under the sheets, gasping like something held under water, an aquatic ape learning it can swim only briefly on the surface of time, and only too briefly, oh so briefly, on the evolutionary scale.

  ‘Don’t bother me, I am working, I am concentrating, hell, it’s hard, it’s a problem, it’s killing me! It’s my life, my life’s work to see this question through.’

  Bonney came to tell him he loved him. It could not be said in words. A group of them had gathered. Eddie Slim flew in from Bali, the most lost of any of them attempting to claw his way back to meaning through various lavish lifestyles and this way of saying sorry to someone he’d maliciously maligned when he could. Men without religion praying through dry lips, trembling with fear of life, too much of it unexpected, the way it unrolled from a bloke’s bare hands even when he kept his fists clenched tight.

  Normie’s eyes were closed, he was breathing so fast, no sportsman had ever had so little oxygen available, no drowning diver, no aquatic ape nor Anglican priest galvanised to walk again, his lips white, pinched in the struggle, devoid of words, devoid of thought, existing maybe in the willed light of prayer but that was all. It had begun with a heart attack. Then a stroke. Then came pneumonia. Now it was all-in TV wrestling in a coma. Sisters and wardsmen rolled him over. Bonney made jokes over his struggle to friends who were there, strangers and friends, foretelling recovery, how Norm was to take it easy again, no arguments, the golden handshake and the leisurely tome by the banks of the trout-fishing river.

  Outside in the frost after the announcement a certain tearless elation. Vengeance of the survivor. Coffee at someone’s house.

  Then, well past midnight, the long drive back into the country. Bonney alone, headlights picking through the starry night, Bonney going carefully to avoid kangaroos and wombats on the road, not wanting another death tonight, no, not of any kind whatsoever, large or small, no extinguishing of consciousness or dreadful moment of Jacquie lifting a telephone in the sleeping house, getting the news. Then stopping for a breather on the top of the Divide, absolutely no other headlights anywhere for a hundred kilometres around. Black night, charmed world, amazing room the world was. Smoke from ice in the grass. The Milky Way crammed with stars. The Southern Cross tilted hard up against Asia at the perpendicular of deep winter.

  Where was the road leading home from here, leading in? Where did it go? Get me onto it demanded Bonney with resolution.

  The gravedigger edged closer on his Kubota front-end loader, checking his watch, moving into overtime while the sun went down between the sheep-bitten hills. Long shadows departed across the gravestones of Isabel Junction cemetery, the crowd moved away.

  Normie’s colleagues from distant universities in their expensive three-piece suits, paunches and Ray-Ban sunglasses, so prosperous and weighty, thinking, who next? There goes the first of their generation to get a chair. Normie’s old supporter Chook Hovell would never have such an insouciant intelligence, such a wise-thinking sidekick to stimulate his liberalism again. There he was tossing a handful of dirt into the bitter earth.

  There was Eddie Slim avoiding Gil Dalrymple, because of greed for gold that transcended decency; there was Tub Maguire’s seven surviving kids out of eleven weeping at the memory of a good man’s good son gone; there was Kingsley Colts in a suit a few sizes too large, rumpled necktie and loose collar, keen to get to the bar at the Five Alls before the tab ran out, arriving late at the back-end of the crowd, leaving early.

  Doors of expensive grey hire cars caught the light, clicked shut on the ashen-faced wife and grown children, this death a rough divorce for them, Normie old mate, rougher than for you, being unasked for, rougher than anything they the living might create for themselves. Dad. Why?

  The unearthly vibration of female vocal chords sang ‘Ave Maria’ as the clods of oblivion thudded. The Catholic anthem beloved of a lapsed Anglican, a lover of natural history, a lover of life proclaiming life.

  Earth was dumped on you, Normie, when all but two went home. May you have a bunch of it in your fist to mound for a place kick now.

  Bonney stayed and took photographs, finding Tim Knox in tears, sitting on a pioneer stone, somehow trying to say he’d sort of never really clicked with Normie, but Jesus Christ he’d loved him.

  Driving home from the airport one night Claude Bonney was exhausted. He was back from the Okavango Delta after thirty-six hours of delays. The film team he’d hired had been good, he’d hardly been needed. His profession felt empty without Normie its outrider, grief and despair had the better of him. He saw shapes in the headlights that were not there, turned the stereo full volume, surrendered to a rush of feeling. Why, Bonney, with nine lives to be lived and lived? Wasn’t he happy? Couldn’t he just hold the happiness like a reverberating chord, the road unribboning into a river of stars? All his life observing nature and now subject to its cuts. The hiving off of friends. The way existence was real as dirt, but provisional as snowflakes.

  Raging hammer of brakes and pelting gravel. Trunk of a tree in shuddering headlights. Bonney shakes himself awake after the microsleep that kills, draws breath, drives on.

  Outside the Lone Gum Garage a broken neon sizzled, steam billowed from a kitchen exhaust. The highway patrol were eating hamburgers and doing paperwork. Bonney could see the naval piping of the burned sailors’ uniforms on the old road behind the hill.

&n
bsp; Properly awake now, driving fast, Bonney wove through the all-night transports and accelerated, taking the Isabel turn-off near the travelling stock reserve where Normie had catalogued every native grass, reptile and rare carnivorous marsupial. The road emptied and became his alone – passed in an hour at the wheel of a Volvo the distance Bonney had cycled in two days as a boy. Mournful Lone Gum lights sucked away, driven back into space, the speakers dying in his ears, the huge curves and unimpeded ascent of the Dividing Range unfolding ahead. He ought to be home.

  Coldness came on Claude Bonney like a river. Two in the morning and late, very late now, across the river and up the Flying Saucer Road, a ribbon of white dust in night-time paddocks bare as the moon. Here Tim Knox stopped to let UFOs sweep towards him over barbed-wire fences, their windows illuminated from within smearing into the watery constituents of light, showing rows of heads turned staring in his direction, he said. Then he said, putting rationality back into what he saw, ‘It was light, just light.’

  Light was the wonder.

  Bonney was fully awake now, warm bed in his mind, Jacquie making room for him, Bonney a stranger to her through his various tempers in a lifetime marriage but that to be made right.

  *

  On a back hollow before moonrise a rusted ute lurked, waiting. Three o’clock in the dead cold Isabel plateau morning. Minus eleven degrees and still. Drought cold, Antarctic valley deep. Dead rabbits and a small black wallaby draped on the tailgate, and Damon Pattison with a bumper glowing in a cupped hand thinking, What’s old Claude Bonney doing coming in so late, where’s he been? Never known such an all-round, self-contained, do-it-yourself merchant. Always thinking. Working it out.

  What if I hit him with the spot, parted a slug through his hair? Wouldn’t that make him wonder? Jesus, would I laugh. And old Bonney, he’d piss his trousers.

  Damon Pattison flipped his butt away into the frosty grass, where it fizzed.

  Blaze of white light – OFU?

  The shot ran through the night. As windscreen glass shattered, Bonney was stunned by a thought, the last he would ever have: I’m on the receiving end.

  It hasn’t hurt yet, then it begins. The shock of it coming through in waves and waves and waves. Scrabble of claws running out the full length of a chain and never arriving. Just those poplars and fragments of fountains touching the stars.

  NINETEEN

  SPOT FIRES TRACKED ROADS LEAPING towards ridgetop estates with tongues of flame pacing Major General Wayne Hovell’s slowly moving car from kilometres away. Helicopters thudded in smoke, taking turns dropping water into crazed balls of heat and banking steeply off. At an arranged rendezvous an escort tanker appeared from a side road leading the car on, emergency lights flashing in the daylight dark. Three hundred metres altitude up from the railway line the Friendly House, restored to its greatness by Fred Donovan, burned to the ground.

  Wearing a maroon beret tugged low on a weathered forehead, Wayne Hovell followed the tanker with the same quick attention he gave to everything in his late age, a bit careful on steep corners with smoke stinging his eyes but otherwise doing all right. At the last road barrier he unfolded himself from the Subaru like an intelligently designed but slightly rusted all-purpose pocketknife, and looked around for a known face.

  They brought Damon Pattison forward, a cop at each elbow steering him up from a gully. Ever since Pattison’s release after serving eight years of a twelve-year sentence, Hovell was the one called when the poor bugger’s name appeared in police files cross-referenced to serial pests. If it hadn’t been for a contact in the force there were three, maybe four occasions when Pattison’s refusal to explain himself would have landed him in court for break and enter or arson – crimes inspired by the basic needs of food and warmth, it might be argued, but in Pattison’s case no margin for excuses allowed as a lifer on early release.

  An odd case, Pattison, having pleaded homicide when manslaughter was more the act he’d bungled when Claude Bonney was shot dead, a poor joke gone wrong – everyone seeing it, even the afternoon editors – all except the judge who underwrote Pattison’s self-condemnation and gave him twelve years. After his time in the slammer he’d emerged a stubborn survivor with terminal unwillingness to explain himself, like a rock or a tree, just being in the world and resisting by nature. Bonney’s widow and family wanted nothing to do with him, but he was still in character as an agent of fate and was just as bent on making amends as he’d been former bent. Just give him his chance.

  After leaving the army Wayne Hovell had spent the next twenty years in public service – with the UN in Africa and then with natural disaster and firefighting coordination teams at home and interstate. He was called to Sydney from beach holidays almost every January and February as New South Wales either flash-flooded or burned. Supporting campaigns for the homeless, the vagrant, the outcast, the friendless and destitute without any fanfare, at least, that he generated himself, was Wayne Hovell’s way. A few times each year he spoke from the pulpit of St Stephen’s Uniting Church in Macquarie Street, giving the lunchtime sermon. Whatever the text, his theme came back to courage in action, how there was no giving without forsaking. ‘Renounce the Hidden’, 2 Corinthians 4:2. It was something easier to encourage in others than to apply to himself. He was one of those finished products of a respected value system, the best a society could offer back to itself. What was his lack, then, his hidden? It was time at the age of eighty-three to bring it out.

  Come Anzac Day Hovell marched with a breastful of ribbon at the head of a limping column. Defence planners and those he’d commanded sought him for guidance on the principle that anyone who’d commanded a platoon and a division had something worth saying on anything. Every three months meetings of the Lady Margaret Hovell Trust in an office high above Martin Place called for his judgement as money was portioned to community organisations fallen between government cutbacks and financial oblivion. A particular interest was prisoner rehabilitation but the net spread wider. On committee days Hovell quizzed investment advisers and chided his sons, in their fifties, about the contents of their portfolios and the degree of ethical consideration going into their share parcels – bluntly, never enough.

  A late-flowering interest was art. Hovell attended painting appreciation classes encouraged by Tabitha, his wife, and developed that dimension of being, the privately intuitive, he’d underplayed in the name of the service-collective.

  Since beginning prison visits a few years back Hovell thought that if the distorted energy Damon Pattison generated could be put to use the world might be a better place. This was after the example of Hovell himself, but so blindingly obviously so that he was for long years unaware of its origins in an episode of schoolboy bullying and the complex fractured jaw that jammed on him, sometimes hourly. That moment, sixty-eight years ago, awaited an act of redress for which Hovell’s distinguished military career had been merely a diversion. It was no coincidence that Hovell’s old quadrangle bully, Colts, had played a role in Pattison’s teenage years but hardly decisive. When Pattison spoke of Colts, Hovell had the impulse to better Colts even yet: to break what was broken. It was a vengeful example of the shamefully hidden. But there you were.

  Pattison’s genius for trouble was astonishing in Hovell’s view. Turn it around, face it the other way, what then? At the time the two met, soldier and inmate, Hovell was guest-lecturing at Staff College where he’d developed a few ideas crossing over from the field of battle into managing peace accords. He’d found his ultimate conflict resolution collaborator in the person of Normie Powell looking at competing tendencies in natural communities. Public Health: what a great category heading that was, symbolical of more than sewerage works and anti-malarial fog machines. It allowed viral opposites to join in the name of unforeseen solutions. There was no point kidding yourself dealing with rabbits when your subject was snakes, Normie liked saying. Then he illustrated the sadness factor by dropping
off the map when best loved, most appreciated.

  ‘I’ve got a question for you, Damon,’ said Hovell.

  ‘What’s new?’ grunted his passenger.

  ‘How’d you get into this particular scrape?’

  Pattison held off answering while they drove through crossroads where people stood at their gates in weird yellow light, gazing north at smoke climbing into the stratosphere. The long ridge was once farmland, with the Friendly House used as a hayshed when it fell into ruin.

  ‘I was up the road, on the housing estate, helping a bloke who does garages. You get the slab in first, then Mike rolls up. You hold one end of a rod while Mike bolts the other. You look for the missing packet of screws – they come in plastic bags with numbers. I was up at the shops getting smokes, standing outside watching the Friendly House burn.’

  ‘That’s all, Damon, just watching?’

  ‘I dropped a match.’

  ‘Intelligent,’ Hovell sighed, unable to help himself.

  ‘A dead one,’ Pattison said.

  Hovell pictured Pattison, the self-appointed deus ex machina catching the eye of a watchful emergency worker or cop, flame feathering his fingertips – Pattison going to the edge of self-destruction on the wildest day of the year, extinguishing the provocation almost too late, only when it was interesting to do so by scraping backwards with a boot heel, perhaps.

  ‘You think I did it. Why’d I go and do a thing like that? Stuff a few leaves up their drainpipe, break a window, let the sparks fly in on all them beautiful Veronica Buckler originals gone up in smoke.’